It has been six years since the George Floyd killing and the subsequent worldwide Black Lives Matter campaign dominated the news agenda. A few months ago, another killing took place, that of 18-year-old Henry Nowak. But it is only several months later that his fate has come to the surface. And even now, it does not appear to have received any attention outside the United Kingdom. But Nowak was white, and the killer belongs to an ethnic minority. The story of Henry Nowak does not fit the narrative.
Henry Nowak was an 18-year-old Polish-British student at Southampton University, where he studied finance and accounting. He was walking home one evening after having been out with friends when he was attacked by a man of South Asian origin. The man — Vickrum Digwa — had a 21-centimetre knife which he used to stab Nowak. When the police arrived at the scene, it was Nowak, and not Digwa, who was placed in handcuffs. Once they realised that he was seriously injured, medical assistance was called, but his life could not be saved. Digwa claimed that he had been attacked first, and that he had acted in self-defence. He also claimed that Nowak was intoxicated, which the court establishes was not the case. Nowak himself filmed parts of the confrontation, and Digwa says in the recording, “I’m a bad man.”
The trial is still ongoing, so no verdict has yet been delivered. A news article at BBC is nevertheless illustrative of how the case is framed in the mainstream media. Here it is Digwa’s perspective that is central:
“I went to block the phone. I took it as well. That was when he hit me … he took my turban, he pulled it off my head. When I bent over, he started saying ‘I’m going to (expletive) you up, I’m going to kill you.’ I felt that he wanted to use the kirpan (knife used by Sikhs, editor’s note) against me.” BBC then reports that Digwa said he did not mean to stab Nowak in the chest when he pushed him away, and cried when he heard that he was dead.
“Clearly emotional, the defendant told the court: ‘I am sorry that it happened.’”
The sympathy thus lies with the killer. There is no evidence that Nowak attacked Digwa first. Nevertheless, the framing used by the BBC is clearly from Digwa’s perspective. As a news broadcaster, they must naturally communicate this as well, but the language is subdued and undramatic. It is important for the BBC to support the narrative that this was an unfortunate, but unusual and tragic incident, without premeditation. The court will decide — but the BBC has already chosen a side.
A direct consequence of naïve kindness
It is therefore not so surprising that it is largely independent media and actors on the British Right, “the online right”, as podcaster Carl Benjamin (also known as Sargon of Akkad) calls this movement, that have taken up the fate of Nowak and refuse to pass over it in silence. Nowak’s fate is in fact a direct consequence of the naïve kindness that anti-racism has bred. People with a skin colour other than white are to be treated with kid gloves, because nobody wants to be accused of being racist. This has been warned about ever since George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. Critics of anti-racism — or critical race theory — have attempted to explain the dangers of dividing people into categories based on skin colour. That was, after all, what Martin Luther King Jr. said, but the anti-racists would not listen. For them, white people are evil, and everyone else is good.
Had the police reacted in the same way and avoided immediately calling medical assistance if the perpetrator had been white and the victim belonged to an ethnic minority, it would guaranteedly have become headlines not only on the British Right, but everywhere in the media. Perhaps we would also have heard about it in the Norwegian media. The threshold is unfortunately high for Norwegian journalists to bother reporting anything that does not fit into the worldview they possess as left-leaning news disseminators. Had it been the other way around, they could at the same time have spoken about the terrible racist Nigel Farage and the fascist party Reform UK, and spun narratives about how Trumpism is spreading in the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe. What can they say when a white European is killed by an Asian? They can in any case not say that racism against whites exists and that the killing forms part of a trend.
But unfortunately, this is not the first time that a similar attack has taken place on British soil. Bhekisani Matabiswana, from Zimbabwe, has just been found guilty of killing Luke Harden after the latter was travelling home from a party in Manchester. Harden was beaten and stomped on while he lay defenceless on the ground. The grooming gang scandal, or rape-gang scandal, is another example in which the authorities do not wish to address crime against Britons, because doing so risks giving them a reputation as racists. This is well documented and not speculation on my part. Here is an article describing the problem — from as far back as 2014!
There are plenty of other examples of killings and assaults carried out by “new Britons”, and regardless of what the statistics show (and they are unfortunately incomplete), we cannot escape the fact that these offences are entirely unnecessary. Both crime and immigration to the United Kingdom are out of control, and when 14 million new people are imported over the course of a decade, increased social problems are to be expected.
Instructions to keep quiet
A few days ago, in the aftermath of the Unite the Kingdom march in London, Zia Yusuf of Reform had some videos made for the party on TikTok, concerning immigration and its consequences, hidden under the pretext of the new Online Safety Act, a law supposedly intended to protect people from harmful content on the internet. The law is instead being used politically, precisely in order to attempt to suppress topics that Labour has decided must not be discussed. It is a form of anti-racism that instead inflames entirely legitimate concerns and risks spiralling out of control when people are told that they cannot discuss them openly. Instead, large sections of the population are labelled racist — and sternly instructed to keep quiet.
Britons in general are of course not racists. The United Kingdom is among the least racist countries in the world. And nobody has said that all immigrants from the Middle East and Africa hate white people. But in recent years there have been far too many incidents involving non-British perpetrators and British victims. The Southport massacre, in which Valdo Calocane killed three people in Nottingham in 2023, and the killing of Rhiannon Whyte, who worked at a hotel for asylum seekers, are only some of these. It subsequently emerged that anti-racism was also a contributing factor in Valdo Calocane’s killing spree. He should have been confined because of his serious mental health problems, but the professionals treating him were afraid of being branded racists, so they instead allowed him to remain free.
There is no “White Lives Matter” movement per se, because most people understand that the development is not about skin colour. It is rather about culture, and cultures that clash and are difficult to reconcile. What we see instead is Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom, the success of Reform UK and “the Online Right”, which communicate about the fates of victims such as Henry Nowak, victims who would otherwise have gone under the radar. But Henry Nowak’s life meant something, not only to his friends and family, but to a society that cannot continue treating people differently on the basis of skin colour.